Philosophers & Saints 186
Local Wonderings in Wichita
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS, is the home to a wonderful bookstore, Eighth Day Books. (Which isn't my favorite bookstore in Wichita, but that's partly because my wife…
Praying in the Streets: Ritual as an Urban Design Problem
"[T]he city as World icon is being destroyed, not by being secularized (it was always secular at base with some sacral potencies shooting through it from every angle) but by…
John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil: A Brief FPR Revaluation
Marian devotion remains stubbornly enduring.
Anarchism, Global Citites, and a Confucian Cosmopolitan Education
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] I recently attended a conference in Nanjing, China, hosted by the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and organized our fellow Porcher, Adam Webb. You can read a short…
The Monday Morning Brass Spittoon: Roundtable on The Synod on the Family
The idea of the family has, since our inception, been one Porchers are particularly keen to defend. The family is a natural, integral, and inviolable unit whose very existence…
The Loss of a Culture of Personhood and the End of Limited Government
Philadelphia, PA The idea and practice of limited government begins with Christianity. Pagan antiquity could not imagine such a thing, because there was no distinction between religion and governance. …
Archimedean Points, Above and Below
“To the famous Archimedean boast: ‘Give me whereon to stand and I will move the world.’. Rabelais answers: ‘I move with my ship; and the waves of the world give…
How Marx Explains the Pomo-Con/Front-Porch Divide, In Four Easy Steps
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Via Rod Dreher, I see that the occasionally interesting blog Postmodern Conservative has departed its longtime home at the (often, if not always) theoconservative journal…
Happy St. Isidore’s Day
In “The Gift of Good Land,” Wendell Berry notes, with a tinge of regret, the largely heroic nature of the stories recorded in the Bible. “It may, in some ways,…
G.K. Chesterton in 1000 Words
I once knew a woman who met Chesterton. It was a brief meeting in the 1920s when she was a girl of about ten or so. Her older sister invited…
Imagining Healthy Work: Why We all Have to Become Monks
This essay was originally presented at Spring Arbor University’s annual Focus series. I am speaking today not as a literature specialist, nor as a professional economist, nor as a business…
A Genuinely Original Libertarian Argument?
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Yesterday evening, I participated in a symposium sponsored in part by Northfield School of the Liberal Arts, a private Christian academy, here in Wichita, KS.…
Liberty and Circuits of the Sacred
A few days ago was the first time I heard Chinese being spoken with a heavy Indian accent. Given the tenor of our times, one might expect this to have…
Can We (not) Talk?
Hillsdale, Michigan. Patrick Deneen posted a vigorous rejoinder to pro-free market critics of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. Deneen’s takedown of Rush Limbaugh got me thinking less about the…
What You Need to Know About Simone Weil
Born in 1909 to secular Jewish Parisians, at age 10 Simone Weil was memorizing Racine and marching in labor union protests. She attended the École Normale and then briefly taught…
What You Need to Know About Hans Urs von Balthasar
This is an entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us what we need to know about a…
Thoughts on Elshtain
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Jean Bethke Elshtain, a profound and important political theorist and ethicist, died yesterday I was lucky enough to have met her perhaps a handful of…
Veritatis Splendor at 20—Lessons for Localists
Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II’s encyclical letter, The Splendor of Truth, is now twenty years old. Promulgated August 6, 1993, the letter addressed fundamental issues in moral theology, responding particularly…
Pondering St. Francisville, Gilead, and our Stories of Place
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Jeremy Beer's recent review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming leads me to once again reflect upon Rod Dreher's excellent book (about which I've…
Radical Traditionalists: The Fall of Triumph Magazine
This article first appeared in Ethika Politika, the journal of the Center for Morality in Public Life. In May of 1970, back from the Vietnam War and newly released from the…
Do Protestants Belong?
Hillsdale, Mich. Ever since I have lived, moved, and had my being in conservative circles, I have encountered an unspoken ambivalence about Protestantism. (Truth in advertising: I am a Reformed…
The Problem of Undertheorized Agrarianism in Most Actually Argued Localism
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] That's a terrible title for this post, I know. But hopefully it'll make sense, if you actually make it to the end. First of all,…
The Pythagorean Temptation
Berwyn, PA. In his Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain argues that one central fault of the modern mind has been its propensity to think of mathematics rather than metaphysics as first…
Ruthie Leming’s (and Rod Dreher’s) Little Way
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Rod Dreher's 2006 manifesto, Crunchy Cons, was an inspiration (and provocation) to many, on both the left and the right. It wasn't that the book…